Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council also described marriage equality as a threat to freedom this week, writing that the Supreme Court is “headed for another Dred Scott opinion” if it finds same-sex marriage bans to be unconstitutional, referring to the ruling which said that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens.

“If the Court overturns marriage, it will not only further delegitimize itself as an institution, it will gravely damage American society,” he said. “And it will undermine the ‘consent of the governed’ — the only basis for just laws.”

Blackwell, notorious for his efforts as Ohio’s secretary of state to stiflevoting in the 2004 election, went on to compare judges who rule in favor of marriage equality to officials in the Jim Crow South who restricted the voting rights of African Americans: “We should remember Selma and the ‘Bloody Sunday’ that was necessary to achieve the too-long-denied equal voting rights for all our citizens. Today, rogue federal judges are engaged in the most massive case of voter suppression we have seen since the days of Jim Crow! Across the country, but especially in the South, black Americans joined other citizens in voting to affirm true marriage.”

But neither Blackwell nor Cruz can claim the prize for the most distraught outburst against gay marriage of the week, as that honor belongs to Indiana politician John Price, who suggested that Americans should “flee” the U.S. before the Supreme Court rules on marriage rights.

I’ve watched with dismay the controversy surrounding Amarillo Town Club’s family membership policy, which was placed prominently before our community by the Amarillo Globe-News on March 2 with its front-page article showing a picture of two angry-looking homosexual women.

The story was also mentioned by a reader in a letter to the editor (Letter: Shame on Amarillo Town Club, March 6, amarillo.com) who believed the business’ conduct was “shameful.”

Shameful? Sometimes I feel like we are living in the twilight zone.

Mechler went on to write that people who criticize his view that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be legalized are actually attacking the freedom of speech: “What I find troubling is the incredible attack that has been launched on free speech. I love this country, and as an American the Bill of Rights gives me the right to say what I please.”

3) Immigrants Will Take Your Guns

Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt is a staunch opponent of immigration reform since he believes that new citizens will vote Democratic and “take away our guns.”

Pratt expanded on this theory in an interview with Armed America Radio recently, explaining that immigrants have a “dependent mentality” and thus don’t understand what it’s like to want to protect yourself from bodily harm.

“A dependent class that depends on the government for their income, for all kinds of financial and other assistance, is not generally of a mind to be able to protect itself, which is after all the most important part about living, is staying alive from one moment to the next in case some dirtbag wants to try to terminate you,” he said. “And if you don’t think enough of your own freedom to take charge of that aspect of your existence, then of course you’re likely to expect handouts and ‘more, more, more’ because you have a dependent mentality.”

On Wednesday, as Media Matters notes, Rush Limbaugh made a similar claim, alleging that administration officials knew Petraeus was leaking sensitive material but “kept it in reserve” and acted on it only “when Petraeus refused to go out and spout the company line on Benghazi.” Limbaugh said that Clinton knew that this cover-up of the cover-up occurred, and that is why she used a personal email account at the State Department: “And so Mrs. Clinton knew that they knew, because she was secretary of state when they sent Petraeus out there to spout the company line and refused to do it. Plus she knew Obama — so that server is to keep things from Obama.”

Since “Obama himself may not even be constitutionally eligible for office,” according to Farah, there is reason to believe that “he and his family might remain in Washington after leaving office” since he has no respect for the Constitution anyway. After all, Farah believes that the Obama family enjoys lavish vacations and is “living it up” on the taxpayers’ dime so much that they may refuse to leave the White House.

Farah even suggested that groups like People For the American Way are paving the way for the third Obama term since there is “simply no organized opposition to Obama’s illegal, criminal actions and behavior.” The only one who can stop Obama, Farah writes, may be Hillary Clinton.

Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt was a guest on Armed America Radio two weeks ago, where he told host Mark Walters that Obama’s executive actions on immigration will destroy the Second Amendment because immigrants are part of a “dependent class” that’s “not generally of a mind to be able to protect itself” or to take care of “staying alive from one moment to the next in case some dirtbag wants to try to terminate you.”

“First of all, we’ve seen that survey data indicates that some 85 percent of the illegals, were they to vote, would vote Democrat,” Pratt agreed. “And on the national level, really without exception anymore, that means anti-Second Amendment.”

“And you actually kind of sketched the larger picture,” he continued. “A dependent class that depends on the government for their income, for all kinds of financial and other assistance, is not generally of a mind to be able to protect itself, which is after all the most important part about living, is staying alive from one moment to the next in case some dirtbag wants to try to terminate you.

“And if you don’t think enough of your own freedom to take charge of that aspect of your existence, then of course you’re likely to expect handouts and ‘more, more, more’ because you have a dependent mentality.”

Earlier in the interview, Pratt predicted that Obama’s last two years in office will bring “an unimaginable assault on all kinds of liberties of Americans” in Obama’s effort to turn the U.S. into a communist country:

We’re going to see, I think, just an unimaginable assault on all kinds of liberties of Americans, be it the mining of coal, the manufacture of ammunition, financing of the firearms industry and their need for loans or whatever. This guy is now going to be in a serious assault mode against so many freedoms that we thought were kind of established here in the United States. Now we’re going to see that no, not according to our Dear Leader, our Dear Leader thinks this has been injurious to the world.

He thinks just the way every communist thinks, that the only reason the United States is prosperous is because we stole our wealth. He doesn’t have the first notion of how the free market works, how it encourages people to produce, how it has actually created wealth. Freedom means prosperity. Socialism has always meant drudgery.

Shortly after terrorist gunmen killed 12 people in an attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris earlier this month, conservative commentator Steve Emerson went on Fox News and claimed that Europe was being taken over by “no-go zones” controlled by Islamic law to such an extent that non-Muslims were not allowed to enter Birmingham, England’s second-largest city.

But at the same time, the “no-go zone” myth gained traction among conservative activists and Republican leaders, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who mentioned it in a speech in London despite refusing to offer the names or locations of the purported no-go zones, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who claimed last week that France has “like 700 no-go zones where authorities have allowed Sharia law to be imposed,” something that he claimed is also beginning to happen in the United States.

The “no-go zone” myth didn’t spring out of nowhere two weeks ago. Instead, it has been percolating for years in fringe media, perpetuated by anti-Muslim activists warning that Europe was being overtaken by Sharia law, soon to be followed by the United States.

Bloomberg pinpoints the beginning of the myth at a 2006 article by conservative pundit Daniel Pipes, who gave the name “no-go zones” to a list of French “sensitive urban zones,” some with large populations of Muslim immigrants, that were, in reality, nothing more than areas hit by high crime and poverty that were actually targeted by the government for urban renewal projects. A few years later, Pipes had the opportunity to visit a few of these “no-go zones” and reported that they were “very mild, even dull” compared to high-crime neighborhoods in the U.S. and that “immigrant areas are hardly beautiful, but buildings are intact, greenery abounds, and order prevails.” He wrote, “Having this first-hand experience, I regret having called these areas no-go zones.”

But Pipes’ retraction came too late to stop the “no-go zone” story from becoming an established fact in fringe right-wing media.

The Muslim population, for example, in France is over 10 percent,” she said. “You see outside of Paris … it can be very frightening. The no-go zones, the Shariah zones, where firefighters and police cannot go. They are many times lured by particular criminal activity into these zones, only to be ambushed. We see it in the U.K., increasingly, the imposition of Shariah law. And people think it can’t happen here, but it is happening here.

Last year, the Clarion Project’s Ryan Mauro similarly warned in a FrontPageMag article that European “no-go zones” would provide “precedent” for such “Muslim enclaves” in the U.S. The publication has been another prominent generator of the myth, frequentlyciting Pipes since-rejected claim about French “no-go” neighborhood.

The myth percolated to the top of the news cycle briefly in 2010 when Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle claimed that Dearborn, Michigan, and the made-up town of Frankford, Texas, were ruled by “Sharia law.” She didn’t use the term “no-go zone,” but was clearly influenced by the myth that had by then become established fact in fringe media.

As recently as last month, Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt was citing the myth to warn that U.S. protests against police brutality would create “no-go zones.”

“It’s like in England and Scandinavia and I guess in Paris and a lot of Europe, perhaps in a lot of their metropolitan areas, the Muslims have come to a preponderant population in those areas that the police do not dare go into the urban areas controlled by Muslims,” he said.

The myth, propagated by a few voices in fringe media, is too wild for Fox News. But it is now apparently perfectly acceptable in the Republican Party.

We think this bears repeating now that a report is making the rounds that Morgan recently turned away a father and son of South Asian descent after asking them if they were Muslim.

The Arkansas Times talked with the young man who was reportedly turned away along with his father:

"My dad and I used to go to this gun range," said the young man, who asked not to be identified by name, "but we haven’t had as much of a chance to go in recent years since I've been at college. It's changed ownership recently."

"When we went in, a woman asked, ‘Where are you guys from?’ We told her we were from Hot Springs. She said, "this is a Muslim free shooting range," so if we are [Muslim] and if we don’t like the rule, then leave. We said that we’re not Muslim, but my dad asked, ‘Why is it Muslim free?’ and they started having a conversation. Then, all of a sudden, I don’t know what went wrong, but she stopped us from filling out the paperwork and said ‘I don’t think you guys should be here.’ She told us to leave or she’d call the cops on us."

Not wanting to cause a scene, they left.

"We’re brown; I don’t know if she assumed we were Muslim," he continued. "When she first asked us, she said, ‘I would hope if you were Muslim you guys wouldn't be cowards and would be up front about it.'" The student told the Times he was born in the U.S. and lived in Hot Springs for ten years before going to college in a different Arkansas town; he considers Hot Springs his home.

He recalls reading about the "Muslim free" shooting range, he says, but "I didn't know it was this place." Once he made the connection, he said, "I kept quiet because I just wanted to have some fun and shoot some guns." He says going shooting with his dad is just something they do occasionally: "father-son time, guy time."

In an interview with the Washington Post, Morgan denied turning the pair away because of their ethnicity and said she did so because they appeared to be “under the influence of drugs or alcohol.” But she did not back away from her ban on Muslim customers, explaining to the Post that the whole reason she opened her gun range was because she had received “death threats because of posting the truth about Islam.” She insisted that she won’t change her policy unless the Koran is altered to remove passages that she believes prescribe violence.

Morgan insisted that she doesn’t “believe all Muslims are terrorists,” although she seemed to say the opposite in a recent tweet:

If you align with a religion whose prophet is a mass murderer/pedophile that commands death to all non-Muslims, then YOU ARE A TERRORIST.

“I don’t believe all Muslims are terrorists,” Morgan said, adding she has “no idea which Muslims are going to be devout and follow those 109 dictates and those who won’t.” So in her mind, the safest thing to do is to ban all Muslims from her club. “I can’t trust that they can be safe to handle guns” in front of non-Muslims, she added.

There’s another reason Morgan doesn’t take much comfort in the vast numbers of Muslims who are not violent: She believes Islam will remain fundamentally a threat until the religion is permanently reformed by removing the more than 100 passages from the Koran that she believes demand violence from its followers.

…

Morgan isn’t alone in her belief. At the gun range, she said, “business is booming” since she announced the ban.

…

The gun range itself, in a way, owes its existence to Morgan’s interpretation of the Koran. “I didn’t even own a gun five years ago,” she said, adding that she learned to shoot because of “death threats because of posting the truth about Islam” on the internet. After that Morgan kept “training and training and training” until she became an instructor. Before all this, she worked in TV news — part of the media that has now become one of her biggest adversaries.

Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt has an explanation for the death of Eric Garner, who was choked by a New York police officer apprehending him for selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk: “socialism breeds death.”

Discussing the assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn last month with talk show host Steve Deace yesterday, Pratt noted that the gunman had mentioned Garner’s death in social media posts before the shooting, implying that the officers’ murder was also part of the death wreaked by New York’s “socialism.”

The dirtbag that murdered the two cops sitting in their car said that he was getting even for Eric, what’s his name, Garner, the guy the cop had taken down and subsequently died on the way to the hospital in an ambulance.

Had New York politicians had not been so bodaciously greedy to have passed such astronomically draconian tax laws so that a guy can actually sell a single cigarette in the black market as a way to make money and I guess at least some kind of a living, and it so bothered the merchants that were selling at required lawful higher prices that they dropped the dime on the guy. And the cop wasn’t just trying to enforce stupid laws because he was a jerk, there had been an actual complaint filed about the guy selling loosies, namely single cigarettes loose from the pack.

That’s how bizarre it is in a socialist city like New York City in a socialist state like New York. Socialism breeds death.

In an interview posted online yesterday, Solomon and Pratt discussed the assassination of two police officers in New York last week, which they blamed on demonstrators.

Solomon, trying to give Pratt cover by saying “Larry will not condone this” suggested, “The next time there’s a die-in, make sure they’re dead. The next time they block the road, run their asses over. I think it will slow down.”

“Well, it’s a very confrontational mentality that we’re dealing with,” Pratt responded, “and at some point the police will have to come to the conclusion that it’s us or them.”

He went on to suggest that the protests would create “no-go zones” in cities where police would refuse to enter: “If they’re going to have to deal with an enemy terrain where a lot of people, and they can’t sort out ahead of time who’s the enemy and who is not, I think that’s going to lead to the conclusion that ‘I’m not going in there.’”

Back in March, Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, gave a radio interview in which he told the story of one of his group’s members threatening a member of Congress, which Pratt thought was just fine because the fear of being shot is “probably a healthy fear” for elected officials to have. A few months later, the exchange made it into a Rolling Stone profile of Pratt and caught the eye of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who it turns out was the threatened congresswoman in question, and who immediately notified the Capitol Police.

Pratt, in fact, was so delighted by the story of threats to Rep. Maloney that he told it last month to a gathering of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in Washington, a group that believes states and counties should ignore federal gun laws.

Rep. Maloney, Pratt said, “went off on a hissy fit” after hearing his comments. The Capitol Police, he added, “came back with a conclusion that there was no articulable threat, which I think was a nice way of saying, ‘You’re nuts, lady, shut up.’”

End Times radio host Rick Wiles interviewed Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt on his program yesterday, and the conversation inevitably drifted to whether the Ferguson protests are in fact a false flag operation to give President Obama political cover to unilaterally implement gun control laws.

“I was thinking how easily something like this could get out of control and there’s gunfire in the cities, if they go into the suburban neighborhoods and begin burning buildings and upsetting cars, homeowners are going to come out with their firearms and begin defending their property. And that sets the stage for Emperor Obama to say, ‘We have to get guns off the streets and this Congress has refused to implement my gun control legislation, therefore by executive order I am doing this, this and this,’” Wiles speculated.

“If he were to do something like that, I think he would trigger, very likely would trigger, a response that would completely put him back on his heels,” Pratt responded, adding that “precisely somebody talking the way you just hypothesized is why they have their guns, so they can protect themselves from tyrants.”

“And the more this guy wants to look like a tyrant the more he’d better stay within Washington, D.C., because if he starts trying to put his imprint on the rest of the country in terms of gun control, that will be a game-changer,” he added.

Wiles repeated his frequent claim that the “delusional” Obama’s “mission is to start a civil war.” Pratt agreed that Obama is on an Alinskyite mission to “bring the system down,” which he will perhaps accomplish through immigration policy.

Later in the program, Wiles wondered if Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel decided to step down this week because he refused to comply with an Obama plot to use the Ferguson case to “whip up social unrest in American cities” in order to stage a military takeover.

“I’m actually speculating that it may be connected to Ferguson, that the Obamanistas are doing their best to whip up social unrest in American cities and the defense secretary perhaps didn’t sign certain orders to activate national guard troops and to do certain things in the state of emergency,” he said. “That’s just my speculation, but it was an unusual event for him suddenly to be pushed out at the same time that we’ve got Ferguson taking place.”

Alan Colmes invited Gun Owners of America’s executive director, Larry Pratt, on his program yesterday and asked the gun lobbyist about some of his more incendiary comments, including his assertion that elected officials should have a “healthy fear” of being shot and his warningsthat President Obama might start a race war.

When Colmes asked him about his comments on threatening elected officials, Pratt responded, “Sure, that’s what the Second Amendment is all about.”

“Otherwise I’m not quite sure how we restrain them,” he said, citing the armed standoff at the Bundy ranch as an example of gun owners stopping the government from “imposing their will tyrannically.”

Pratt also cited the 1946 “Battle of Athens” as an example of this system working.

Colmes then asked Pratt about his conversations with extremist talk show host Stan Solomon, in which Pratt agreed with Solomon’s predictions that President Obama would "put together a racial force to go against an opposite race resistance, basically a black force to go against a white resistance” and instigate attacks “on Christian, heterosexual white haves by black, Muslim and/or atheist…black have-nots.”

Pratt told Colmes that anybody who reads racial politics into these conversations is playing the “race card” because the term “black force” referred to “the way ninjas dress.”

A race war, however, is “something that the president wouldn’t mind seeing,” he added.

Pratt lamented that the “Democrat [sic] party” believes that “everything is to be reduced to race or some sort of sexual perversion,” while Solomon was flummoxed as to why “they can’t help themselves but reach out and hug the Muslims and the Muslims, if they’d ever get into the position, would kill half the Democrats.”

The two then talked about how they have been preparing for the prospect of Sharia law governing America and that unlike defenseless liberals, they will be ready to fight back. Pratt reasoned that “the liberals are so consumed with hatred of our country that when they see somebody like a Muslim who hates America as well, they can’t get it through their head what you just pointed out, that they’re next. If they get those folks in power, if they pull off what they’re trying to do, they’re toast. You and I can probably protect ourselves because we’ve been preparing for that.”

Solomon then suggested that President Obama is Muslim who is married to a man: “A homosexual Muslim married to man, I can’t imagine how Barack Obama would do if he ever ventured into a Muslim country and didn’t have 800,000 armed people around him.” (We aren’t sure if Solomon is referring to the far-right conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly married to his male Pakistani college roommate or the one that Michelle Obama is a transgender woman.)

The gun lobbyist replied that Obama was steeped in Islam but most likely “disparages every religion, his religion is Barack Obama, but he is a man that does not like this country.”

Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America has repeatedly extolled the virtues of politicians having a “healthy fear” of being shot because such fears are a way to make sure that they “behave” and support gun rights.

Last month, an Arkansas gun range owner named Jan Morgan got some national attention when she declared her business a “Muslim free zone,” writing on her website, “This is more than enough loss of life on my home soil at the hands of muslims to substantiate my position that muslims can and will follow the directives in their Koran and kill here at home.”

What many news reports missed is that Morgan is not just the owner of a single shooting range, but a national gun activist who has spoken at multiple events for the “religious liberty” group Liberty Counsel as well as Tea Party gatherings and last month’s misnamed “Two Million Bikers” rally against President Obama.

And Morgan has some friends in high places in the gun lobby. In an interview with Arizona-based radio host Josh Bernstein this week, Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt praised Morgan, saying that she was “on very sound ground” with her Muslim ban.

“I know there will be a lot of people that will be outraged at that, but we don’t facilitate murderers and if you read the Quran, it’s an instruction to go kill people, lots of them,” Pratt said. “And there are Muslims that don’t buy into that, well, how do I know which one you are?”

All of which reminded Pratt that he had been meaning to start giving out a Gun Owners of America award and Morgan “ought to get it.”

Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt is convinced that President Obama is destabilizing the U.S. military while lifting up undocumented immigrants, and Pratt thinks he knows why: the president is trying to create his own personal paramilitary staffed by undocumented immigrants.

“Bring them in from out of town, they don’t have any connectivity with the folks in the area and they’re only going to be loyal to the guy who brought him,” he explained.

Pratt also used the interview to address the Bundy Ranch standoff, calling it “one of the greatest moments in modern American history.”

“We saw our fellow Americans, probably with no more urging than an email informing them of what was happening on Cliven Bundy’s ranch, pick up, go out to the ranch, arm themselves before they left and just stood there as interposers between the feds and Mr. Bundy,” he said. “I thought that was incredible. It led to something that took most of us by surprise.”

He added that government officials are just waiting for a crisis in order to implement “special measures” to seize people’s firearms.

Holder’s commitment to redressing racial injustice was no more warmly received by the Right than his work in support of LGBT equality. After Holder spoke out against voter ID laws, which disproportionately harm people of color, Texas Gov. Rick Perry accused him of “purposefully” “incit[ing] racial tension.” Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt argued that Holder’s open discussion of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system means that he is the real “racist,” asserting last year that Holder wants to “intimidate the rest of the country so that we don’t think about defending ourselves” against “attacks by black mobs on white individuals.” Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association went so far as to say that Holder would never “prosecute someone if the victim is white.” And after Holder visited Ferguson, Missouri last month, David Horowitz outrageously commented that the attorney general was leading a black “lynch mob.”

And those are just a handful of the attacks the Right has leveled against Holder for his work protecting equality under the law.

The fact that the far Right has reacted with so much vitriol to the attorney general’s leadership is a sign not only of how uninterested they are in the civil rights that the Justice Department is meant to protect, but also of how effective Holder’s work has been. The next attorney general should share Holder’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of all Americans – and, by extension, make all the “right” enemies among those hoping to turn back the clock on civil liberties.

Larry Pratt, president of Gun Owners of America, was a guest on Gordon Klingenschmitt's "Pray In Jesus Name" program once again today where he amazingly asserted that those who push for gun control legislation are insane zealots who are fundamentally immune to facts.

As Pratt explained it, liberals are motivated entirely by "feelings" and therefore push for things like gun-free zones solely because they feel safer without guns around, failing to realized that gun-free zones are actually making them less safe because it leaves them vulnerable to mass shooting attacks.

"Their feelings are so intense that the string of mass murder after mass murder in gun-free zones just doesn't seem to shake them off that conviction," Pratt said, before asserting that conservatives, on the other hand, always ensure that their views and positions are rooted in fact and reality.

"We live in a rather ddifferent universe from those who support gun control," he said. "And just to repeat, the facts just don't seem to ever get under their skin. I guess it's the definition of a zealot that no matter how many times he fails at doing something, he knows that if he does it one more time the same way, he's going to succeed. That's otherwise knows as the definition of a crazy person."

Then, without a hint of irony, Pratt immediately followed up that statement by declaring that it is the mission of his organization to completely eliminate all gun control laws.

"We want to see gun control legislation taken off the books," he said. "We think 'shall not be infringed' means shall not be infringed, period! No other discussion is permitted by that language":

Larry Pratt, president of Gun Owners of America, recently appeared on Gordon Klingenschmitt's "Pray In Jesus Name" program where he declared that Democratic lawmakers are rightly afraid of being shot by gun owners because "that’s what the Second Amendment is all about."

Klingenschmitt asked Pratt why wealthy activists like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg are willing to spend large amounts of money in supporting gun control measures when, according to Klingenschmitt, doing so only hurts Democrats at the polls.

Pratt said that Democrats in general support gun control because they are socialist "control freaks" who know that if they are ever going to be able to control every aspect of the lives of America citizens, they first need to take away all of their guns.

And those guns first need to be taken away, Pratt said, because Democrats are fully aware that their efforts to exert total control will result in them getting shot.

"They clearly want to exercise power that, in their judgment, would cause enough push-back to stop them from doing what they're doing," Pratt said. "And I just said in a nice way that they're afraid of getting shot and they ought to be! That's what the Second Amendment is all about. They ought to be afraid of an armed people so that they don't get into a situation where they would actually provoke violence":

This is not the first time Pratt has expressed the sentiment. This summer, he earned a rebuke from the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — a Democratic lawmaker was shot in an assassination attempt — for saying that the fear of assassination was "a healthy fear" for members of Congress to have.

The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, this month presented a dilemma for the anti-government Right. The activists and elected officials who spent the spring fawning over lawless Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s stand against what they saw as an overbearing federal government changed their tune or just went silent when a police force armed with military weapons cracked down on mostly peaceful protesters in Ferguson.

We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.

We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

As Weinstein notes, the Missouri chapter of the Oath Keepers has sent a “letter of warning” to Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon in opposition to police tactics against the protesters. But the Oath Keepers’ opposition seems to be based less on principle than on strategy — in a separate blog post, the national group objects to the police failure to stop looting while it took aim at peaceful protesters. The blog post also notes that Oath Keepers on the scene in Ferguson were “talking consensus for the benefit of the police and the people equally.” This role of self-appointed mediator is in sharp contrast to the group’s show of force at the Bundy ranch.

Ferguson has exposed some common ground between the anti-government Right and mainstream civil liberties groups — for instance, both the extreme right-wing Gun Owners of America and the American Civil Liberties Union have signed on to a plan to end the program that sends discount military equipment to local police departments.

Sheriff Richard Mack, the founder of a group that believes that county sheriffs are the highest law enforcement officers in the land, has also been strangely silent on Ferguson, despite having spent time rallying against the federal government at the Bundy ranch with armed militia groups that he compared to Rosa Parks.

Yes, the relative silence of the anti-government Right on Ferguson is inconsistent, but so is their view of the Ferguson protests: In the view of many right-wing activists, the protesters in Ferguson weren’t standing up to the government, they were themselves tools of the government.

There is aschoolofthought among right-wing commentators that the protests in Ferguson were orchestrated — or at the very least encouraged — by Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration in order to stir up racial resentments and increase Democratic chances in the 2014 midterm elections.

The Ferguson protests exposed a key fault line in the anti-government "Patriot" movement: they are against government overreach, but their definition of what counts as government never seems to be quite clear.

Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt has been insistent that Republicans mustopposeimmigration reform in order to save gun rights, which he claims are threatened by immigrants.

In an interview with extremist talk show host Stan Solomon that was posted online last week, Pratt alleged that immigration reform would destroy the GOP and therefore the country: “That means kiss our Second Amendment goodbye, it means, really, kiss our republic goodbye, because if you give the Democrats a lock on all of the levels of government, the country goes communist.”

“It’s just the end because they know no limit to the big government that they support,” he said. “It will be extremely dangerous, and gun owners will be early on in the sights of those Democrats that might be voted for by the newly minted voters. So the idea of amnesty is a really bad idea.”

Pratt and Solomon also agreed that Speaker John Boehner and the rest of the GOP leadership have effectively “switched sides” and joined the Democratic Party.

Gun Owners of America Posts Archive

RWW’s Paranoia-Rama takes a look at five of the week’s most absurd conspiracy theories from the Right.
This week, we learned from the Right that gay people and immigrants are out to destroy our freedoms, with the help of President Obama, who is secretly preparing to stay in office for a third term.
5) Gay Marriage Threatens Freedom
Speaking with an Iowa talk show host this week, Sen. Ted Cruz once again appealed to the anti-gay Right when he railed against judges, like the members of the Iowa Supreme Court, who strike down bans on same-sex marriage. Cruz alleged that such... MORE >

Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt was a guest on Armed America Radio two weeks ago, where he told host Mark Walters that Obama’s executive actions on immigration will destroy the Second Amendment because immigrants are part of a “dependent class” that’s “not generally of a mind to be able to protect itself” or to take care of “staying alive from one moment to the next in case some dirtbag wants to try to terminate you.”
Walters prompted Pratt to discuss why the president’s immigration actions are “a threat to gun owners”... MORE >

Shortly after terrorist gunmen killed 12 people in an attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris earlier this month, conservative commentator Steve Emerson went on Fox News and claimed that Europe was being taken over by “no-go zones” controlled by Islamic law to such an extent that non-Muslims were not allowed to enter Birmingham, England’s second-largest city.
Emerson’s claim was met with ridicule, including by British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Emerson and Fox quickly retracted the claim.
But at the same time, the “no-go zone” myth gained... MORE >

Last year, when Arkansas gun range owner Jan Morgan announced that she would ban Muslims from patronizing her business, we noted that Morgan is a frequent speaker at conservative events — she had a speaking slot at the 2013 Values Voter Summit — and has fans among prominent gun activists, including Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt, who wanted to give Morgan an award for her “Muslim-free” policy.
We think this bears repeating now that a report is making the rounds that Morgan recently turned away a father and son of South Asian descent after asking them if... MORE >

Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt has an explanation for the death of Eric Garner, who was choked by a New York police officer apprehending him for selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk: “socialism breeds death.”
Discussing the assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn last month with talk show host Steve Deace yesterday, Pratt noted that the gunman had mentioned Garner’s death in social media posts before the shooting, implying that the officers’ murder was also part of the death wreaked by New York’s “socialism.”
The dirtbag... MORE >

Gun Owners of America’s executive director, Larry Pratt, once again egged on an unhinged violent rant from Internet talk show host Stan Solomon this week, this time as Solomon urged police officers to kill nonviolent protesters demonstrating against police violence.
In an interview posted online yesterday, Solomon and Pratt discussed the assassination of two police officers in New York last week, which they blamed on demonstrators.
Solomon, trying to give Pratt cover by saying “Larry will not condone this” suggested, “The next time there’s a die-in, make... MORE >

Back in March, Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, gave a radio interview in which he told the story of one of his group’s members threatening a member of Congress, which Pratt thought was just fine because the fear of being shot is “probably a healthy fear” for elected officials to have. A few months later, the exchange made it into a Rolling Stone profile of Pratt and caught the eye of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who it turns out was the threatened congresswoman in question, and who immediately notified the Capitol Police.
Pratt’s group reacted to... MORE >

End Times radio host Rick Wiles interviewed Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt on his program yesterday, and the conversation inevitably drifted to whether the Ferguson protests are in fact a false flag operation to give President Obama political cover to unilaterally implement gun control laws.
“I was thinking how easily something like this could get out of control and there’s gunfire in the cities, if they go into the suburban neighborhoods and begin burning buildings and upsetting cars, homeowners are going to come out with their firearms and begin defending their... MORE >